Well, it should almost be time to start watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer… it’s far enough into the hour that I should be able to skip all of the commercials using my TiVo without running out of recorded material.

I love my TiVo! (And Buffy is very addictive. 🙂

For the past week or two, I’ve been using Dance Dance Revolution instead of my NordicTrack to get my daily dose of aerobic exercise, and it’s definitely been working out quite well. It’s a lot more fun, and much more interesting, since DDR is at least as much a mental game as it is a physical one. I just recently managed to reliably pass a five-foot song by realizing the trick was to expand by lookahead by one.

I haven’t updated my LJ in a while, mainly due to my being insanely busy, and not being terribly effective at work. I think it’s due to my not getting enough sleep; so that’s something I really need to work on. Last weekend two friends of mine from MIT, Carolyn and Jason, got married. The service was held at a historical estate in Canton, and both the weather and the service and the location was gorgeous.

Blargh…. I’m having trouble getting motivated today. I think part of the problem is that I’m behind a whole bunch of different fronts, and actually working on tasks (so I can get catch up) reminds me of how far behind I am, and so I want to avoid working on stuff. It’s stupid; really stupid, but it’s still hard to fight. What makes even dumber is that I’ve finished up all of my tasks that do have tight timelines, so what’s left is a bunch of things for which it’s not a disaster that I’ve this far behind — but it’s just that I feel unhappy with myself about where I am with stuff.

Hmm, I haven’t updated my LJ in a while, mainly because I’ve been insanely busy. I pulled my first all-nighter on Monday in quite a while, working on a paper for the Usenix conference in June. Then Tuesday I was up until Midnight finishing up final version of the paper, and getting my taxes done and filed. (Thank goodness New Englanders get an extra day this year to file taxes due to Patriot’s day!

The following message is from the Episcopal bishop in Jerusalem, and talks about how the Israeli’s are treating Palestinians (including non-combatents and Arab Christians) in Ramallah. Granted that the suicide bombings which have targetted civillians is horrific and barbaric. But the Isreali’s are supposed to be “the good guys”; “the one functioning democracy in the Middle East”; our committed friends, according to our fearless leader, George W. Bush. I can’t make or influence national policy.

I just finished reading an article in the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine which was entitled Power Steer. It described how modern beef is produced — and produced is the right word here. That article is making wonder (a) what does grass-fed beef taste like (it’s supposed to be more “flavorful” or, ah, “tough”) and (b) how much it costs compared to the industrial beef which most of us eat most of the time.

I spent the morning trying to get work done — or at least trying to; I wasn’t half as productive as I wanted to be. Sigh… Part of it is that that I don’t have my own space, so I’m just less efficient. Also, only having a dialup connection to the net doesn’t help. It’s also though that I’m getting easily distracted, for some reason. The Garmin Streetpilot III arrived today, via Federal Express.

The past week I was in Minneapolis attending the IETF meeting. Although network access was plentiful there, I was so busy I didn’t have any time to update my journal. It was a good meeting, though. A lot of good stuff got done. The two teams who had been proposing competing “son-of-IKE” proposals have agreed to work together toward a combined proposal. I announced the results of the nominating committee, which means my job as nomcom chair is pretty much done (thank goodness!

I’ve been off the air for a while (no Internet connectivity), and it seems that an eternity of stuff has happened in the mean time. Last week, on Saturday (on March 9th), I was woken up at 8am when my father called me. My parents were little over a week into a three week vacation in Australia, and I certainly wasn’t expecting a call from him then. In a completely emotion-less voice, he tells me to take a piece of paper, and to start writing down information.